Good Reasons for New Questions

-Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

I read an interesting story about suitcases this week, by Swedish journalist Katrine Marçalv. In 1970, she writes, a U.S. luggage company executive, “unscrewed four castors from a wardrobe and fixed them to a suitcase ...  put a strap on his contraption and trotted it gleefully around his house,” thus inventing the wheelie.

Except that’s not quite true, not, at least, the inventing part.

As she researched a book about women and innovation, Marçal came across a 1952 photograph of a woman with a wheeled suitcase, and other evidence of suitcases on wheels as far back as the 1940s. But the luggage industry didn’t embrace the wheelie until the early 1970s. Why?  Marçal discovered the answer: gender roles and stereotypes.  Men, the reasoning went, did not need wheels; they could carry their suitcases.  Women didn’t need them because they traveled with men, who carried their suitcases, too.

Assumptions about gender quashed suitcase innovation for decades, until the industry finally acknowledged that women did travel alone. Then the wheelie was “invented” and marketed, to women. Not until a male airline pilot created the cabin bag in 1987 did men become part of the market.  Now wheeled luggage is virtually all there is.*

Here’s another story, more recent and more serious. Two researchers in Texas have developed a Covid-19 vaccine, called Corbevax, that is remarkably easy and cheap to make, using a decades old approach that has proven effective not only for the current virus but for earlier SARs varieties, and hepatitis as well.  So why haven’t more of us heard about it?  Why didn’t it come out sooner?

According to the researchers, Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi, it’s because they “couldn’t get any traction in the U.S.  [government] . . . People were so fixated on innovation that nobody thought, 'Hey, maybe we could use a low-cost, durable, easy-breezy vaccine that can vaccinate the whole world.” 

Private philanthropists eventually funded the researchers' work, and unlike pharmaceutical companies, Hotez and Bottazzi are giving the vaccine recipe away for free.  Writing about this story for NPR news, journalist Joe Palca makes the case that the US government’s over-zealousness for innovation slowed the progress of (ironically!) innovation. It’s worth asking also, I think, if the lack of opportunity for profit slowed that progress too.

Another story, this one told by Yale Psychologist Phillip Atifa Goff and journalist Shankar Vedantam  during a recent Hidden Brain podcast:  

In 2003, 15-year old Denver, Colorado resident Paul Childs, who struggled with mental illness, became seriously agitated at his family’s home and brandished a kitchen knife.  Alarmed, his family called 911 for help. Police arrived, and as the situation escalated, shot and killed Paul Childs.  At a subsequent press conference, Denver Police Department Division Chief Tracee Keesee, who is Black, was asked by a woman in the audience, “Does your police department train your officers to kill young black men?”  Goff describes Keesee’s pause before she responded, “I don’t know.”

Keesee and Goff eventually began to collaborate in an effort to answer that question.  Goff affirms that data solidly evidences a far larger percentage of Black Americans accosted and killed by police than white Americans. In response to Vedantam asking if Goff shares that experience, Goff replies, “I’m a Black man in America; of course I have....if you’re Black in the United States and this hasn’t happened to you, you’re living a vanishingly rare life.”

But Goff and Vendantum make the case in this podcast that the problem of police violence against people of color has been wrongly defined in public discourse. Goff reminds us that there are over 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country, plus everyone who can call 911, and can, says Goff, “use law enforcement as their personal racism concierge.”  He continues, “If the problem is individual character, inside hearts and minds, a defect of the soul, .... then we’re dealing with a problem that can’t be fixed.”

So Goff and Keesee went after different ways in, asking different questions, for example: in what specific situations do most incidents of police shootings if Black men occur?  One answer was when police chase people on foot. Based on that information, and information about the physical and emotional state of almost all officers during foot chases, the researchers asked another question:  what if officers took a deep breath before they started to run? The answer:  when police were supported to take that deep breath, incidents of Black deaths at the hands of police decreased by 23%.

One deep breath.  

I encourage you to listen to the whole story. It’s far more nuanced and fascinating than I’ve described here.  But seriously, one deep breath, sometimes counting to ten, is all it took.

The story of the wheelie suitcase is largely one of commercial gain and convenience, stymied by bigoted assumptions about gender.  That’s illustrative of a widely accepted understanding that gender assumptions limit us in myriad ways.

The story of the vaccine? That slowing of innovation has probably already contributed to serious illness and death among millions of people, many of them – and this is deeply noteworthy, Black and Brown-skinned.

The story of deep breaths before  foot chases reducing by almost a quarter Black death at the hands of police?  That’s as good a reason to think differently as I have ever heard.

In the Hidden Brain podcast, Phillip Atifa Goff describes a “Kind of neglect, a negligence in the way we ask questions,” about police violence. That negligence impedes countless innovations in the service of a more equitable and less violent future.  It’s a life and death negligence, urgently demanding a sharpened collective ability see things differently, to ask new questions

The ILI was born of this urgency -- taking up the critical imperative to find and act on innovative paths to a more equitable and nonviolent future. These stories affirmed our mission, and I’m grateful to be part of that work.

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“Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention.” (article) By Katrine Marçal.  The Guardian. 6/24/2021.
 
A Texas Team comes up with a COVID vaccine that could be a global gamechanger.  By Joe Palca. NPR News 1/5/2022
 
Changing Behavior, Not Beliefs. Hidden Brain Podcast. Shankar Vedantam, host and Executive Editor. 1/10/22